A landmark bipartisan bill aimed at stabilizing college sports and protecting student-athletes cleared the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee on June 18 and is expected to receive a Senate floor vote in July. This marks the first time a major college reform bill has advanced this far in the Senate.
Spearheaded by Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas., and Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., the Protect College Sports Act was introduced last month to regulate college sports and provide antitrust protection to the NCAA.
“We need order and stability now,” Cantwell said in her opening statement on June 18. “The craziness that is happening in this marketplace with cutting of thousands of roster slots, the taxing students’ fees for education to pay for football, the arms race that is basically taking money away from research and development. Our task here is to win the race in innovation.”
The bill was voted 19-9 and included support from Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa. It now must pass the 60-vote threshold in the Senate before advancing to the House of Representatives. If approved by both chambers, it would then be sent to President Donald Trump’s desk. The bill can still be challenged and changed throughout this process.
The history behind the proposed legislation
The NCAA has sought congressional intervention for years to help regulate college athletics. College sports officials have asked Congress to help them create a national standard for how athletes are paid and for antitrust protections to avoid continuous legal challenges.
“There have been dozens of attempts at congressional intervention in college athletics for decades, but it certainly has increased the past 10 years because of justified litigation over a broken college sports model and restricting athletes’ rights,” said David Ridpath, a professor of sports business at Ohio University and an expert on NCAA governance.
Last year, the SCORE Act advanced through two major House committees but did not reach the floor for a vote. That proposed bill was focused on creating a national framework for name, image, and likeness compensation and failed because it did not receive bipartisan support.
What does the bill say?
The proposed bill would provide an antitrust exemption, allowing the NCAA to regulate athlete transfers and eligibility within certain guidelines. It would also establish limits on athletes’ compensation and prohibit coaches from leaving before the season ends with their current team. Coaches who violate this rule would be ineligible to coach for the following season.
The legislation also seeks to protect women’s and Olympic sports programs. Major colleges and universities would not be able to cut the number of women’s and Olympic sports programs, roster spots, or scholarship opportunities below current levels. The U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee endorsed the bill.
“The revised version of the Protect College Sports Act ensures that higher-resourced NCAA Division I athletic departments — those with annual revenues exceeding $80 million — will maintain at least the same number of roster spots as in the 2024-2025 academic year,” wrote the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee in a statement. “We welcome that the agreement provides reasonable flexibility, including traditional protections for mid-sized institutions, while preserving overall participation opportunities.”
Student-athletes would be allowed only one unrestricted transfer during the NCAA designated windows in their career. Any other transfer would cost the athlete a year of eligibility.
The bill would also allow colleges and conferences to voluntarily pool their media rights under a single entity rather than negotiate deals solely through individual conferences. The NFL voiced its support for the voluntary pooling of media rights, according to ESPN.
What are the experts saying?
Ridpath said pooling media rights could generate more revenue and allow colleges and universities to share that revenue across the entire college athletic ecosystem.
“That could be used to help expand sports offerings and save current sports,” Ridpath said. “College sports is an incubator for Olympic and national teams, and if we start cutting these sports, we’re going to become less competitive.”
Ridpath said this bill is a “fair effort” to regulate college athletics, but his biggest issue is the lack of direct negotiation with student-athletes.
“If the NCAA wants real legal and antitrust protection, if they would sit down and negotiate with the athletes as a collective body, that would give you legal cover because everyone has agreed to the rules,” he said. “Until you speak directly with the athletes, I think we are still going to have litigation.”
What are people saying?
College sports stakeholders have voiced mixed opinions on the bill.
More than 20 conferences, including the American, Big East, and Atlantic 10, have expressed support for the bill. The NFL, MLB, and the National Basketball Players Association sent statements to Congress voicing their support as well.
Charlie Baker, the NCAA president and former governor of Massachusetts, publicly backed the bill on social media.
“Every sports league needs rules, and there are certain challenges to NCAA rules that only Congress can address,” he wrote. “The bipartisan Protect College Sports Act’s sections bolstering eligibility, transfer and agent policies are needed now to deliver on that obligation. As a former governor, I understand that getting important legislation done requires compromise. While the bill does not address every issue college sports face, the current state of play cannot continue, and we must move the bill forward.”
However, the Big Ten and SEC, the wealthiest college conferences, oppose the bill as it stands, saying revisions are needed to gain their approval. Part of the bill prevents conferences that declare more than $1 billion in revenue on their 2025 tax returns — the SEC and Big Ten — from forming a “super-league.”
“From the outset, we identified a set of essential revisions to the PCSA necessary for the long-term sustainability of college athletics,” the two conferences wrote in a joint statement on June 18. “We have worked with both majority and minority staff to advance those revisions, which focus on better supporting student-athletes and stabilizing the college sports environment.”
Letters obtained by The Inquirer from former Penn State trustee Anthony Lubrano showed Penn State president Neeli Bendapudi writing on June 17 to Sens. Fetterman and David McCormick in opposition to the bill, saying “significant problems remain” in the legislation.
Lubrano, whose term ended Tuesday, said Bendapudi did not collaborate with the board of trustees on the correspondence with Fetterman and McCormick. He believes it would be in Penn State’s best interest to support the proposed legislation.
“For Penn State, we’d be best served to embrace the legislation and work to enhance and improve it over time,” Lubrano said. “But in the absence of perfection today, we shouldn’t allow perfection to get in the way of being good, and so we should be behind it.”
The bill, he said, protects all student-athletes and the non-revenue Olympic sports at Penn State.
“Listening to the senators on a number of calls I’ve had with them, it’s clear that one of their primary concerns revolves around the Olympic sports,” Lubrano said. “If you do nothing, schools will likely discontinue some of their programs in the non-revenue sports, and a lot of those are Olympic sports. So consequently, you can envision a day where the United States isn’t competitive on a world stage at the Olympics. Is that what we want to see happen?”
